October 14, 2009 12:10 AM

Tips for planning out your best fit spring schedule

Wow it's amazing how telebears phase 1 is here yet we are in the middle of getting through this fall semester!! For this reason it is important that we start looking into classes and start asking our friends about classes they recommend.

Something that I have learned from planning out my schedule (for the past 4 years) is that we should not set our schedule in stone early on but have some options to decide on the first week of classes. Although those classes may seem very interesting to us, during the first week we may realize that two of our most challenging classes will have midterms on the same day. If you have other class options you can have the choice of taking another class (this happened to me for PH162A- Microbiology and MCB 102 and I had a horrible semester even though the classes were interesting I was not able to study as well as I would have liked to because both of the midterms were back to back from one another).
This brings me to another very important point that when choosing classes it is important to understand that everybody can handle different levels of courses and that you need to realize what would be a good fit for YOU!!!! Just because your roommate was able to take a combination of classes it doesn't make it a good fit for you and vice versa. Especially for the lower division classes like chem 1a, chem 3a/b, the math 16 series, the bio's etc, it is important to understand that these classes take up a lot of time to study and people can handle certain combination of classes better than others. It does not make you inferior if you need to make a preparation course for chem 1a or need to start with precalculus (I needed to), if it will help you in the long run than you should definitely go for it. The truth of the matter is that people come to Cal with different levels of preparation based on what their high schools offered -it is not a fair playing field :-( The best we can do is acknowledge it and take classes that we can handle. Obviously we are stressed to graduate on time, but if you have the flexibility to spread out some of your core science classes (you know the classes that you need to really super dedicate yourself to), then why not. After all the classes have to be a good fit for you!!!!